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isbn 978-3-8253-4635-5

The Comeback of Populism


Transatlantic Perspectives

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The Bavarian American Academy (BAA), founded in 1998, supports research on North America and on European-American as well as inter-American relations, and provides a network of cooperation for scholars from the fi elds of cultural studies and the social sciences specializing in these areas. The BAA organizes annual conferences and summer academies, sponsors regional symposia and lectures, and supports postgraduate studies.

www.amerika-akademie.de

paul · prutsch · gebhardt (Eds.)


opulism” is a fuzzy and diffuse term. It neither identifi es a specifi c political program nor does it clearly situate political positions along a left-to-right spectrum. Instead, it refers to a particular strategy of com-munication and a style of political performance. Analyzing the sweeping resurgence of populism in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, this volume seeks to shed light on some of the implications of populism’s astonishing comeback from a transatlantic and interdisciplinary point of view and to evaluate it in both, a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. Contemporary populisms need to be interpreted and understood in their cultural and political specifi cities, i.e. their local forms, on the one hand, and their global interrelation and outreach, on the other. They often share an authoritarian approach intertwined with anti-elitist and anti-establish-ment resentments while posing as capturing and expressing the ‘voice of the people.’ Real or imagined scenarios of threat and anxiety are met with a rhetoric of emancipation from suffering and victimization, yet this eman-cipatory zeal is couched in a militant rhetoric of exclusion and, usually, nativism. Working through populism’s simplifi cations and mystifi cations, the contributions examine its discursive strategies in nuanced ways. Among the authors are Frank Decker, Akwugo Emejulu, D. Sunshine Hillygus, Michael Hochgeschwender, Carlos de la Torre, and Hans Vorländer.

V O L U M E 21

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publikationender bayerischen amerika-akademieBand 21

publicationsof the bavarian american academyVolume 21

series editor

Bavarian American Academy

4635-5 Tit. Paul Bd.21.indd 14635-5 Tit. Paul Bd.21.indd 1 23.07.19 09:0423.07.19 09:04

note on the editors

Heike Paul is professor of American Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg and director of the Bavarian American Academy.

Ursula Prutsch is professor of history of the USA and Latin America at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

Jürgen Gebhardt is professor emeritus of political science at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg.


The Comeback of PopulismTransatlantic Perspectives

Edited byheike paulursula prutschjürgen gebhardt

Universitätsverlag winterHeidelberg


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Table of Contents

Heike Paul

Introduction .............................................................................................. 1

Hans Vorländer

Populism and Modern Democracy – An Outline.................................... 13

Frank Decker

Populism in Germany and Abroad ......................................................... 29

Jürgen Gebhardt

“We the People”: Popular Sovereignty, National Identity, and the

Democratic Principle .............................................................................. 45

Michael Hochgeschwender

US-Populism in the Late Nineteenth Century ........................................ 55

Jack Zhou, D. Sunshine Hillygus, John Aldrich

Understanding the Trump Win: Populism, Partisanship, and Polarization

in the 2016 Election ................................................................................ 65

Laura Vorberg

#BasketofDeplorables: Digital Imagined Communities, Twitter-Populism,

and the Cross-Media Effects of Popular Political Social Media

Communication in the 2016 US Presidential Election ........................... 89

Michael Oswald

Jobs, Free Trade, and a Conspiracy: Trump’s Use of Producerism ...... 109

Heike Paul

Authoritarian Populism, White Supremacy, and Volkskörper-

Sentimentalism ..................................................................................... 127

Simon Strick

Right-Wing World-Building: Affect and Sexuality in the ‘Alternative

Right’ .................................................................................................... 157

Akwugo Emejulu

Feminism for the 99%: Towards a Populist Feminism? ....................... 183

Nicole Anna Schneider

Redefining “We, the People”: Black Lives Matter and the

Democratization of Political Culture .................................................... 189

Sascha Pöhlmann

Missing the People: Populist Aesthetics and Unpopular Resistance .... 215

Donatella Izzo

Pop(e)ulism: Populist Miracles and Neoliberal Theologies ................. 235

Carlos de la Torre

What Can We Learn from Latin America to Understand Trump’s

Populism? ............................................................................................. 253

Ursula Prutsch

Populism in Brazil: Getúlio Vargas and Jair Bolsonaro ....................... 275

Notes on Contributors ............................................................................... 293

Introduction

Heike Paul

The very day that Donald Trump was inaugurated as US president, the trailer for the

fifth season of House of Cards was released.1 It was a trailer that depicted the

American flag in a windy breeze against a darkened sky, while children’s voices

recited the pledge of allegiance. However, the American flag in the trailer is flying

upside-down in front of the capitol in Washington, D.C. as the patriotic oath is

recited. As such it is “a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life

and property,” to quote the United States flag code.2 The combination of a somewhat

gothic lighting and the children’s voices (along with doomful foreshadowing

instrumentation) is reminiscent of strategies of anticipation in horror films and thus

foreshadows uncanny moments, if not an uncanny future. The children’s voices

synchronized into a choral-like performance evoke processes of disciplining and the

production of conformity and unison in the name of the state, a state just turned

totalitarian, we may assume, even as the chant appears to be a normal, quotidian

cultural practice. In the more recent archive of American television series, this

sinister teaser trailer and its mise-en-scène possibly not only reference the new

episodes starring Frank Underwood and his wife (who are by now history) craving

power but also allude to a possible analogy with Trump’s new America (that began

on the very day of its release and that is not yet history).3

The mood that this trailer conjures up accentuates a sense of impending threat

that is attributed to greedy, corrupt, incompetent authoritarian politicians, who

disrupt political culture and democratic habitus and who endanger the system of

checks and balances, i.e. politicians who prioritize ‘being the boss’ over ‘serving the

people,’ even as the latter is what they proclaim to do. Any resemblance to actual

persons may not be purely incidental here. In that sense, it addresses one appalling

aspect of the specter of populism. Momentary shock mixed with deep concern

characterized the atmosphere in many academic-activist circles in the wake of the

2016 US presidential elections. Immediate reactions were hands-on and somewhat

therapeutic. Publications in the self-help vein joined and counter-balanced the

largely dystopian scenarios and tried to advise the citizenry on their best bet in

1 See: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_NcYIfcVTA>. Last accessed on 1 April 2019.

Thanks to Katharina Gerund for pointing out this clip to me. 2 See: United States Flag Code: Title 4 of the United States Code, Chapter 1, §8a. 3 Kevin Spacey himself has suggested this analogy in the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on 16

September 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXBIBtXTVNg>. Last accessed on 1

April 2019.

2 Heike Paul

‘surviving Trump.’ Gene Stone’s The Trump Survival Guide: Everything You Need

to Know about Living through What You Hoped Would Never Happen (2017) is just

one exemplary text.4 Cultural Anthropology quickly devoted a special issue on “The

Rise of Trumpism” with an introduction by Lucas Bessire and David Bond and with

posts by Judith Butler, Michael Taussig, Susan Harding, and Ann Laura Stoler. As

the membership in the American Civil Liberties Union sky-rocketed,5 a whole new

(younger) generation became deeply politicized through their opposition to Trump

(see, for instance, Miner).

It was in the context of these initial responses (somewhere between red alert and

attempts at cold-eyed analysis) that this volume was first conceived. The annual

conference of the Bavarian American Academy in July of 2017 in Munich took “The

Comeback of Populism: Transatlantic Perspectives” as its theme and initiated a

discussion among political scientists, historians, and cultural studies-scholars from

both sides of the Atlantic. Ever since then, the conversations have deepened and have

been enriched by colleagues in other fields, such as sociology, media studies, and

literary studies. In the meantime, the cross-disciplinary scholarship on populism has

on the whole become even more voluminous and diverse, yet it has not entirely

moved away from alarmism and a sense of urgency. Clearly, the symptoms of crisis

are multi-layered, point to quite a number of diverse factors facilitating populism’s

success, and thus need to be addressed from various angles: political, social, cultural,

and economic. This volume hopefully adds some fresh perspectives by younger

scholars and renowned experts in their fields to the growing archive on populism’s

return as an inter- and transnational phenomenon. It seeks to engage this much-

debated development with regard to its three key title terms: populism, comeback,

and transatlantic perspectives.

Populism has been called many things and remains a fuzzy concept: it has been

dubbed “a style” of political communication (Moffitt), a “language” (Kazin), a

“logic” (Laclau), a “syndrome” (Wodak 47), a “thin ideology” (Mudde), a

“Kampfbegriff” (Manow), and a political strategy that uses “polarization” as a

“political method” (Priester 47).6 Jan-Werner Müller and others have dissected a

4 The notion of survival and survivorship (in the context of self-help and trauma

studies/posttraumatic stress) is also addressed in chapter 9, 10, and 12 of Trumpism: The Politics

of Gender in a Post-Propitious America (2018). One of the more pronounced titles in the proto-

therapeutic vein is One Nation after Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the

Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported (2017) by E.J. Dionne, Jr., et al. For a broader

contextualization of events, see Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the

Twentieth Century (2017). 5 “In the 15 months that followed the election, the A.C.L.U.’s membership went from 400,000 to

1.84 million. Online donations in the years before averaged between $3 and $5 million annually.

Since then, it has raised just shy of $120 million” (Lovell). 6 For an introductory overview, see also The Oxford Handbook of Populism (2017) and Political

Populism: A Handbook (2017).

Introduction 3

“populist imaginary” (98) and identified a peculiar construction of ‘authenticity’ and

an illusion of the immediate transposition of the people’s will (Volksnähe, see also

Weale) that satisfies an alleged longing for simplicity among the populace, i.e. it

reduces and counters any complex understanding of the world and operates in sharp

dichotomies. These attempts at defining populism agree on the insight that the

defining criterion is form, not content, and they all ring true with regard to the

contemporary political scene. “[F]amily resemblances” (Judis 14) exist between

populisms in Europe and the Americas, between left and right, and hence we are not

talking about a specific political program but rather about a set of assumptions about

the political sphere and the (ab)uses of political language. Populist politics not only

thrive on us vs. them-oppositions, they also interpolate the electorate in a direct

relation to a leadership figure, often at the expense of those intermediary institutions

that co-constitute the democratic system and guard the separation of powers.

Populist movements “are very much part of the American political fabric” (Judis

19), and they also have their history in Europe. Often, populism is discussed in

conjunction with fascist movements – in his film about the 2016 presidential

election, Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore does so – however, both are clearly not to

be confounded (see Albright 228-9). Recently created subcategories such as “neo-

populism” (or “neoliberal populism” [Betz et al.]), “pluto-populism” (Wolf; Pierson)

or “authoritarian capitalism” (Bloom), and, last but not least, “Trumpocracy” (Frum)

try to programmatically capture the cultural, political, and economic specificities of

the current faces of populism in the West.7 Of particular relevance for an ordering

of the often fuzzy discourse on populism is Philip Manow’s analysis focusing on the

political economy as symptom of crisis in Western Democracies. According to

Manow, we cannot talk about populism without talking about capitalism and anti-

globalization (8-9). Whereas the essays in this volume define populism in different

ways for their arguments and concerns, the elasticity of the label appears to be

productive and problematic at the same time: Without a specific cultural and political

context to moor it to, it is of little analytical use. Hence, such in-depth

contextualization appears to be important even as we are addressing a broader,

transnational phenomenon.

The comeback of populism has been widely discussed and has been dated

variably: some scholars see the rise of populism in Europe dating back to the success

of protest movements in Scandinavian countries against tax raises and too much

government intervention. In this timeline, the first populist party in Northern Europe

is the Danish Progress Party (Fremskridtspartiet), which was founded in 1972 by

Mogens Glistrup. Those, who focus on political style, see the career of Silvio

Berlusconi as reflective of populism’s comeback roughly a decade after the end of

7 Martin Wolf calls this policy a mixture of “tax reform, with the familiar combination of

unfunded giveaways and magical thinking on deficits” (Wolf).

4 Heike Paul

the cold war. On May 8, 2001, Berlusconi announced in a television talk show his

contract with the Italian people, actually holding up a piece of paper to emphasize

his supposedly genuine intentions. Italy has often been considered a “laboratory” of

populism.8 This speaking “for the people” or even posing as “the voice of the people”

is a topos Donald Trump – among others – has picked up for his campaign and uses

it continuously in his statements. This illusion of a direct relation between the leader

and the people implies a dramatic erosion of logics of abstraction and is to be found

in similar ways in the populist anti-European backlash in Eastern Europe (Poland

and Hungary) even as the sense of abstract representation is foundational for the idea

of political representation in democratic systems. On the other hand, a left-wing

populism with an anti-capitalist agenda (Greece, Spain) also needs to be taken into

the equation. With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the tide of populist

movements seems to have reached a new crescendo that upended many predictions

about election results in particular and the future of liberal democracies in general.

Yet, the comeback-thesis that this volume largely subscribes to is also partially

controversial. Some scholars suggest that politics in liberal democracies have always

and continuously had a populist element. Following these observations, Trump’s

predecessor Barack Obama is characterized as employing populist strategies (he was

the first US presidential candidate to make full use of social media in his campaign)

and so is Emmanuel Macron, who has been labelled a “populist of the center”

(“Populist der Mitte,” Merkel quoted in Köppchen). Populism, it is implied here,

does not per se have to be viewed as a political anomaly or pathology but may also

be considered as invigorating politics and increasing participation in all political

spheres. And yet, populism and the charisma of populist candidates seem to

interpellate the supposedly rationally inclined voter as a primarily affectively

invested fan. Performances like those of Trump cater to a fan-base and a “fan-based

citizenship” (Hinck’s term) rather than to an electorate, and this may not only have

the effect of simply mobilizing a constituency but also of producing excessive

agitation. In the wake of Max Weber’s study on “charismatic authority,” sociologists

have discussed the compatibility of democracy and charismatic leadership long

before election and campaign paraphernalia became fetishes of democratic fandom.

Much has been written, for instance, on white women’s fandom for Donald Trump

(see, for instance, Chira).9

8 Lutz Klinkhammer in a panel discussion on “Populism Today and Yesterday” at the Berlin-

Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften on 20 June 2017. Klinkhammer also reminds

us of Berlusconi’s talkshow-appearance as a kind of “Ur-scene” of European populism. 9 The popularity of right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic with a female constituency

(somewhat counterintuitive to their party’s anti-feminist agenda) shows the ongoing relevance

of classic feminist scholarship on female complicity in patriarchal structures (Mittäterschaft, see

Türmer-Rohr) and points to the need for a rigorous feminist critique of the phenomenon of

populism.

Introduction 5

A transatlantic perspective is offered in various contributions to this book. It

returns us to the conundrum of hyper-nationalist politics in transnational contexts. It

points to various top-down and bottom-up attempts at populist stimulation that

happen within the nation-state and that are amplified in transnational comparison.

Recent scholarship has begun to offer comparative perspectives on populist

movements across Europe and beyond. With the recent publication Populism,

Populists, and the Crisis of Political Parties (Pallaver et al.) our book shares the

comparative angle – even as we have above all a transatlantic perspective rather than

a focus on comparison in a European context. Clearly, both sides of the Atlantic

exhibit a cultural backlash of sorts. Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris – examining

Trump and Brexit – use this “backlash”-concept in order to analyze the growing

appeal of populism. Their argument reconfirms and reinforces the longstanding

diagnosis that populism produces a kind of culturalization of predominantly socio-

economic conflicts and disparities. In other words: it recasts conflicts about

distribution and precarity as conflicts about identity and recognition, i.e. different

lifestyles and values. Accordingly, those negatively impacted by the consequences

of globalization and the doings of finance capitalism can be recruited by

authoritarian politicians via populist promises of (cultural) recognition (of the kind

that cannot and will not be kept). This can be rendered in the logic of a backlash

because it ultimately aims at the abolishing of pluralism and promotes the return to

a symbolic and social order prior to the pluralization of society, the recognition of

minority rights, and affirmative action. In such a world, old privileges would be

reinstated that mainly favor white men – mostly at the expense of women and non-

whites (Brownstein). As a poll conducted on behalf of Associated Press in 2016 has

shown, many Americans still harbor the idea that a “typical” American is white and

Christian. Republicans, in particular, cherish this notion (57%), among the

Democrats only 29% hang on to this image of Americanness. In Europe a 2018-poll

by the Bertelsmann foundation indicated that a majority of Europeans share a sense

that things were better in the past (de Vries et al.). Drawn together, both polls indicate

somewhat of a pull against cultural pluralism, economic globalization, and, yes,

gender and race equality. As there will be no return to state-based capitalism (Nancy

Fraser), the challenges that populisms present are most likely here to stay.

The following contributions offer multi-disciplinary insights into the

phenomenon of populism’s returns.

In his opening essay, “Populism and Modern Democracy – An Outline,” Hans

Vorländer puns on the title of a Hollywood classic to look at “the good, the bad,

and the ugly” versions of populism in the present-day political landscape.

Symptomatically, the resurgence of populism may point to a deficit in representation

in modern democracies and hence may infuse new dynamic energies into rather

static democratic structures and force fields; yet, the recent “populisms of

6 Heike Paul

indignation” in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere cannot easily and simply

be considered forces of democratic renewal, Vorländer argues, and often have to be

seen as rather “illiberal” in outlook and effect. Still, populism harbors transformative

power for liberal democracies across the political spectrum, a power which is

currently unfolding in rather complex ways. Following upon this state-of-the-art

reappraisal of scholarship on populism, Frank Decker examines right-wing

populism in Germany and abroad and offers a rationale for its emergence that covers

social, economic, and cultural aspects and shows how these aspects have to be re-

prioritized depending on the specific country and the political agendas of populist

parties. Decker points to the varieties of populism and offers a typology to

distinguish different kinds of populist parties. He also suggests crucial root causes

for the (belated) rise of right-wing populism in Germany.

Historicizing current debates about populist returns, Jürgen Gebhardt’s essay

also avoids the recourse to a generic concept of populism that constructs a more or

less irreconcilable difference between populism’s democratic claim for direct civic

participation and a representative system of democracy. Rather, he offers a

genealogy of the concept of ‘popular sovereignty’ as it emerged in the great

revolutions and was bound up with the communitarian order of the sovereign nation

state. Therefore, Gebhardt suggests, democratic orders reveal an inherent tendency

toward self-referential populism and nationalism. At critical junctures, past and

present, these moments have characterized the political culture and institutional

make-up of constitutional polities in the modern political world. In a similar vein,

Michael Hochgeschwender provides an overview of American populist movements

in the late nineteenth century, where he partly sees the origin for the current return

of US populism. He delineates the historical development of populist parties and

movements such as the Grangers, the Greenback Labor Party, and Evangelical

Protestants and extends this history to the present moment and its political and

cultural climate, offering an interpretation of the motivations and goals – mainly of

an economic nature – that these movements and their supporters share.

In their contribution to this volume, Jack Zhou, D. Sunshine Hillygus, and John

Aldrich address the question whether the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections

in the United States can actually be attributed solely to populist sentiments. Using

post-election survey data and statistical modeling, they observe, somewhat

counterintuitively, that so-called standard predictors, such as party identification,

political ideology, and the recent economic conditions, played a more prominent role

in the elections than the often foregrounded three dimensions of populism (socio-

economic, political, and cultural). In their analysis, voter behavior in 2016 in the

United States did not dramatically differ from previous elections, and hence they

question that Trump’s election in itself can be looked upon as evidence of a return

of populism.

Introduction 7

Somewhat contrary to these findings in voter motivation, several contributors to

this collection do see a shift, at times even fundamental changes in political

communication and political style. Donald Trump’s particular style is addressed in

several contributions: Laura Vorberg examines his campaign from the perspective

of media studies and systems theory. Her contribution, “#BasketofDeplorables:

Digital Imagined Communities, Twitter-Populism, and the Cross-Media Effects of

Popular Political Social Media Communication in the 2016 US Presidential

Election,” proposes to examine one instance of Donald Trump’s campaign – his

response to Hillary Clinton’s labelling of Trump-supporters as “basket of

deplorables.” Clinton’s phrase allowed him to self-fashion as the “leader of the

deplorables” in a most effective way and to capitalize on this across various media.

Trump’s success as a populist, Vorberg suggests, is very much connected to the

specific kind of “twitter-populism” he has introduced to political campaigning.

Michael Oswald focuses on one particular aspect of Trump’s populist formula, that

of a rhetoric of producerism. In simplistic binary oppositions, Oswald argues in his

analysis of Trump’s strategy, Trump pits producers (of value, money, goods) against

parasites and successful businessmen (like himself), who are thriving in a low-tax,

anti-regulation environment, against a corrupt government with a bureaucratic

apparatus that takes money out of the system (and everybody else’s pockets) and

‘kills’ jobs. Trump has told this narrative excessively and in doing so has catered to

an important part of the American voters.

Heike Paul’s contribution on “Authoritarian Populism, White Supremacy, and

Volkskörper-Sentimentalism” analyzes the return of a Volkskörper-logic in right-

wing populism that is thoroughly racialized and gendered in disturbing ways. This

Volkskörper-sentimentalism (discernible in the rhetoric of Trump as well as among

right-wing anti-feminist groups in Europe) is part of a “white Atlantic”-imaginary;

it insists on an organicist model of society that is conceived as homogenous, even

‘pure,’ and allegorized via white women’s bodies and their sexual integrity. In a

broader context of right-wing populism’s culture, Simon Strick examines the soft

power of “Right-Wing World-Building” regarding its ordinary affect structures. He

shows how a discourse of self-help and self-care (involving body-building, diet, and

the maintenance of ‘healthy’ intimate relationships) time and again also (re)produces

whiteness, while camouflaging or at least side-stepping the violence foundational

for the right-wing projects of “world-building,” a violence that only occasionally

relates self-care to the project of maintaining the good health of the white race.

Akwugo Emejulu and Nicole Anna Schneider come to the discussion of

populism from an angle that addresses social justice movements, feminist

movements, and Black Lives Matter, probing bottom-up approaches of populist

resistance. Akwugo Emejulu’s “Feminism for the 99%: Towards a Populist

Feminism?” asks whether and how the constituent elements of populism can be

subverted for the purpose of building a new internationalist feminist movement

8 Heike Paul

around issues of intersectionality. Such “a grassroots, anti-capitalist feminism,” the

author sees embodied in the political mobilization following the inauguration of

Trump and in the worldwide Women’s March in January 2017. The so-called F99-

movement draws on the strategies of the Occupy-movement and joins forces with

feminist groups in the Global South and North. Similarly fleshing out and analyzing

a different kind of populist politics, Nicole Anna Schneider focuses on the role and

rhetoric of ‘the people’ in the Black Lives Matter-movement. She discusses how

processes of group formation become visible in its protest culture of signs, posters,

and actions in the context of various events. Drawing on the works of Ernesto Laclau,

Chantal Mouffe, and others, she provides a detailed analysis of photographs taken

during the protests against police brutality and places them alongside those used by

the media in the representation of the same events. Schneider describes the tensions

between the wish for a more inclusive understanding of ‘the people,’ the efforts to

produce discomfort on the part of ‘the people’ by raising awareness for anti-black

violence, and the antagonistic positioning against a police force whose actions are

per definition considered to be an institutional implementation of legitimate

democratic rule.

Sascha Pöhlmann approaches the topic of populism by addressing its

connection to popular culture. Discussing Walt Whitman’s self-representation as a

man of ‘the people,’ Pöhlmann points to the (failed) efforts of the poet to seek

popularity by imagining ‘the people’ as his preferred audience. Whitman’s

paradigmatic failure of “missing the people,” is echoed in a large variety of cultural

productions, past and present, in different media formats, including comics, video

games, film, and music. Pöhlmann’s essay ultimately points to the ambiguous

relationship between the popular and the populist: whereas popular culture claims

widespread dissemination and acceptance, it also displays a resistance toward

populism.

In the archive of populism, Italy is often addressed as one of the first sites to have

experienced a resurgence of populism centering on a media-savvy populist leader.

Donatella Izzo revisits this history from the angle of Marxist critique and television

culture and links it to recent narratives as quasi-allegorical engagements with the

question of leadership as the epitome of – or, one might say, as a substitute for –

politics under the conditions of neoliberalism. Paolo Sorrentino’s drama series The

Young Pope serves as a poignant attempt to (re)articulate the narrative of leadership

within a (political) theology. This use of the Pope as a trope also evokes an

association between populism and Catholicism, a connection, which has been

repeatedly theorized within Italian critical theory.

The two final contributions widen the scope of the volume once again to include

analyses of populism and populist politics in Latin America. Carlos de la Torre

situates Donald Trump’s 2016-election as US President in a larger context of

populist movements (and successes) in the Americas and Latin America specifically,

Introduction 9

where populists have been in power since the 1930s. Addressing right- and left-wing

populist figures such as Juan Perón, Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa,

the author shows how populists in different Latin American countries have

undermined democratic institutions and structures, and he anticipates serious

challenges for the United States, its democratic system and its civil society under

Trump. Taking this comparative angle into the present, Ursula Prutsch sheds light

in her essay on recent developments in Brazil – and on Jair Bolsonaro’s win in

October 2018. She looks closely at Bolsonaro’s campaign strategies as candidate

(his aggressive social media usage and his self-fashioning as an outsider to politics)

and at his political strategies and decisions as president. In her assessment of the

Bolsonaro presidency, Prutsch draws comparisons with long-time Brazilian ruler

Getúlio Vargas and US president Donald Trump.

The scope of this volume, thus, reaches from Germany, Italy, and European

populisms more broadly to the United States and the Trump presidency, and, finally,

to Latin America. The different faces and phases of populist politics bear

resemblances as well as pronounced difference. Populism in a generic form does not

exist. Typologies and definitions are helpful for a systematic understanding of the

mechanisms of populist movements and leaders; historical context and cultural

specificity inform and are part of populism’s make-up.

Arguably, the sense of impending doom the TV series House of Cards projected

and that I have referenced at the beginning of this introduction has not been banished.

It has perhaps even been exacerbated by the record the Trump-presidency has

produced – alongside other constellations elsewhere. Among other things, cultural

imaginaries rehearse various scenarios of endings – or they revisit caesura of the

past. By inversion, the title of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 seems to ask

whether the election of Donald Trump is as devastating as were the terrorist attacks

of 9/11. Once again, every single thing seems to become affected – in ordinary and

extraordinary ways.

Versions of authoritarian populists may exist in unexpected places. Recently,

Stephen Greenblatt has revisited Shakespeare’s kings – pushing the allegorization in

Shakespeare’s texts far into our own time. Likewise, Shakespeare-productions have

become conspicuous as sites of protest and political dissent with the presidency,

especially when Julius Caesar (newly popular in American playhouses) bears a

visual likeness to the president and is received as a “Shakespearian depiction of

Trump” (Paulson et al.). Next to the historical drama, the genre of the dystopia is

alive and well, once again. Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, whose classic

dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale has had a huge comeback in the last couple

of years (as a book, as a television series, as a graphic novel, and as reference in

10 Heike Paul

protest culture),10 is publishing a sequel to it, The Testaments. In fact, gendered and

racialized dystopian worlds abound in the pages of Louise Erdrich’s Future Home

of the Living God (2017), Naomi Alderman’s Power (2017), Omar El Akkad’s

American War (2018), and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019). All of these stories

produce a level of discomfort and fear that echoes the message of the flag hanging

upside down.

The editors would like to express their profound gratitude to Susen Faulhaber for

diligently proof-reading the entire manuscript, for checking on bibliographical

references, for making the essays conform to the style sheet, and for producing the

formatted final version.

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Introduction 11

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Populism and Modern Democracy – An Outline

Hans Vorländer

Many attempts have been made to define populism, of which only very few have

been convincing. The most persuasive approaches to the phenomenon of populism

seem to those that have attempted to analyze its manifestations within their

particular historical, cultural, and political contexts (see Priester 2007; Beigel et

al.). General and systematic definitions of the term have for the most part failed.

And yet a way must be found to approach populism descriptively, analytically, as

well as normatively that goes beyond its particular manifestations and seeks to

determine the relationship between populism and democracy (see Taggart; Mény et

al.; Decker 2003, 2005; Mudde et al. 2012; Hartleb; de la Torre; Diehl; Graf

Kielmansegg). The current renaissance of populism necessitates such an approach,

and recent studies have already pointed in this direction (see e.g. Müller; Mudde et

al. 2017; Jörke et al.).

Many years ago, in reference to a well-known film, I wrote about “the good, the

bad, and the ugly” in order to be able to differentiate between various populisms

and their complex and ambivalent relationship to democracy (see Vorländer

2011a). Whether this heuristics is still fruitful for classifying contemporary

phenomena from Trump and Orban to Brexit, the ‘Patriotic Europeans,’ and the

Alternative for Germany warrants further examination. It should not be ruled out a

priori that aside from bad populisms, which threaten democracy, and ugly

populisms, which destroy it, there might also exist populist movements and actors

that by touching the sore spots of democracy call attention to undesirable

developments and shortcomings and in this way contribute to democracy’s

renewal. Populisms certainly are symptoms of a crisis of democracy. However, the

problem is that they at the same time also intensify this crisis and thus put

enormous pressure on liberal systems. I will begin with some rather elementary

and phenomenological reflections before turning to the specific problem of

populism and modern democracy within the current situation.

What Is Populism?

Populism and democracy both contain a central reference to the term ‘people,’

which makes their relationship to each other problematic. Populism could be read

as if democracy were realized only through it. Democracy, as is generally known,

14 Hans Vorländer

is based on the sovereignty of the people; accordingly, populism is inscribed into

democracy. It is an intrinsic phenomenon rather than one introduced from the

outside. Populism moreover can pose a challenge to democracy by demanding of it

to honor its promise of a ‘true’ and ‘real’ rule of the people. A different and more

common perception of populism, however, is that it threatens the very core of

democracy and eventually leads to its destruction. Here, populism figures as the

pathological flip side of democracy, which expresses democracy’s proneness to

crisis and possibly also excess. It thus is not surprising that populism is regarded as

a Hydra threateningly raising her ever-different head in different contexts. Those

who so wish can study the ambiguities of the people’s rule as far back as Athenian

democracy’s impressive practice of direct and immediate exercise of authority by

the demos on the one hand, and its derailment by demagogues and political

seducers who knew how to sway the masses on the other. The Athenians’ remedy

for the damage brought about by demagogues was ostracization: the seducers of

the people were banned from their city.

More recently, discussions of populism regularly include references to rightist

or extreme-right populisms in Europe (see Mudde; Decker et al.; Kriesi et al.). At

times, individual politicians, regardless of whether they are on the right or on the

left, are also called populists. This, however, is not the whole story. Historical

studies have also related the term ‘populism’ to other contexts in which movements

or parties emerged that allegedly had a ‘populist’ flavor. Thus at least three ‘waves

of populism’ can be differentiated: agrarian populism, Latin American populism,

and the contemporary populism of the New Right. Firstly, agrarian populism goes

back to developments in 1830s America, when then-president of the United States

Andrew Jackson was able to unite farmers, craftsmen, and small businessmen into

a protest movement against big business, the banks, and emerging industrial

structures and through this expansion of political participation initiated a (mass)

democratization of the US political system. A similar case was the protest by

farmers, workers, and so-called Greenbackers in the 1890s, which was directed

mostly – if not exclusively – against the social disruption caused by industrial

capitalism, and brought considerable electoral success to William Jennings Bryan

and the Populist Party, later the People’s Party, which were fighting, among other

things, against the industrial monopolies of the so-called robber barons and an

expansionist national monetary policy (see Goodwyn). Secondly, the nineteenth-

century Russian intellectual movement of the Narodniks can also be counted

among the forms of agrarian populism.

Latin American variants of populism, which have blossomed especially since

the 1940s and 1950s and were at that time connected to the authoritarian regimes

of Perón in Argentina and Vargas in Brazil, can be said to constitute the second

wave of populism (see de la Torre et al.). Subsequently and until today, Latin

American populism has at times also appeared in left versions, but it has always

Populism and Modern Democracy – An Outline 15

been embodied by strong leader figures: Meném, Collor, and Fujimori right up to

Chavez, Morales, and Maduro. Since the 1970s, movements of the New Right have

gained strength in various European states and in the Anglo-American world. Since

then, populism has more and more been associated with parties on the right. Some

of these parties are openly anti-democratic, while others hide their anti-democratic

stance beneath a facade of bourgeois respectability. Some parties on the right

position themselves as anti-immigrant and increasingly also anti-Muslim parties;

many pose as protest parties and garner a significant portion of the electorate. Most

of these parties, for example the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), Austria’s FPÖ,

Italy’s Lega Nord, the Netherland’s Partij voor de Vrijheid (formerly Lijst Pim

Fortuyn) under Geert Wilders, France’s Front National under Jean-Marie and more

recently Marine Le Pen, the new Scandinavian populist parties, and UKIP in the

UK, have (or had) charismatic leaders who know (or knew) how to mobilize their

constituencies and unite them under the party banner. At the same time, the

populism of the New Right appeals to xenophobic, racist, and nationalist

sentiments based on topics such as immigration, taxes, and crime.1

Recently, populism has also been successfully reaching for power and taking it

first in Latin America, then in North America – more specifically in the United

States –, and in the Czech Republic. In Austria, the FPÖ (Freedom Party of

Austria) has for the second time come to power as part of a coalition government.

In the United Kingdom, the populists, and not only those of UKIP, managed to

mobilize voters for Brexit. In Western Europe, the coming into power of populists

admittedly was prevented, as were further electoral gains by populist parties in

Austria, the Netherlands, and France. But populists in office in Central and Eastern

Europe have been working with brute consistency on a new model of democracy,

which Hungarian prime minister Orban has called “illiberal democracy” (see

Orban) and which constitutes the antithesis to the Western, pluralist, constitutional,

checks-and-balances understanding of democracy. And, so as not to entirely lose

sight of Germany: in these parts, through Pegida and the AfD (Alternative for

Germany), a connection to international right-wing populism seems to have been

established. Do these current phenomena still belong to the third wave of

populisms or is this a new constellation, a fourth wave conducting a frontal assault

on democracy as we know it? And lastly: What about left-wing populism, dignified

1 The conceptual categorization of these and similar parties in the international and German

literature on the subject varies between (Populist) Radical Right, Right Wing, Extremist, and

Fascist. This is due to the problem of conceptual boundaries, which I attempt to solve in this

article by gathering them all under the rubric of populism, with the exception however of the

extreme and extremist right. It should be noted that populist groups on the right are often

marked by a certain fluidity that reveals their function as bridge builders and partners in right-

wing alliances, an issue which warrants further empirical analyses (see Mudde; Finchelstein;

Minkenberg).

16 Hans Vorländer

by intellectuals such as Laclau and Mouffe (see Laclau; Mouffe; Mouffe et al.; for

an assessment thereof see Priester 2014; Möller) for breaking the alleged

hegemony of ‘neoliberalism’ and practiced in France by Mélenchon and his

movement La France Insoumise during the 2017 presidential election campaign?

The Spanish Los Indignados, Podemos or the Greek Syriza, all both movements as

well as parties, can also be counted among the left-wing populists.

The Modus Operandi of Populisms

Any generalizing definition – even a minimal definition – reaches its limits very

fast. The question whether populism is an ideology or ‘only’ a style, a doctrine,

rhetoric, conviction, or a polemical figure differentiating oppositional from

governmental populism, the populisms of movements from those of politicians,

temporary from enduring and legitimate from illegitimate populism can be

answered either way, depending on which a priori definition is used to identify

populist phenomena and in which contexts the respective tendencies, groups, or

movements operate. This is a strong argument for abandoning general as well as

minimal definitions in favor of a descriptive semantics that is historically open and

at the same time context-sensitive, which is why it seems more accurate to always

refer to populisms in the plural, as they differ in terms of substance, structures, as

well as their historical, cultural, and institutional frameworks.

And yet the question may be asked what it is that different populisms have in

common. Their commonality seems to be a specific political mobilization strategy

that draws on recognizable semantics, symbolic references, and political

constructions. Five characteristics can be pointed out that as the modi operandi of

populisms provide them with a specific appearance and internal structure. First, all

populisms explicitly refer to the ‘people’ and/or the ‘common man’ and sometimes

also to the ‘plain citizen.’ They construct a people by resorting to the mechanisms

of inclusion and exclusion. This is why, second, populisms constitute themselves

by use of clear-cut fundamental binaries, with their rhetoric structured along basic

differences such as ‘us’ and ‘them,’ ‘over’ and ‘under,’ ‘inside’ and ‘outside;’ the

assertion of these differences becomes triadic whenever a middle-class populism

defines itself against those ‘above’ and ‘below’2 or a right-wing populism against

the establishment and foreigners. Third, categories such as ‘they,’ ‘over,’ ‘under,’

and ‘outside’ are used to construct collective, stereotyped entities whose function it

2 Karin Priester (2007) most notably shows that modern, contemporary middle-class populism

has a dual thrust. Another interesting question is whether the difference between a populisme

des modernes and a populisme des anciens is also grounded herein (see Hermet; I am grateful

for this reference to Alexandre Escudier).


is to provide meaning for and enable the establishment of an identity that is ‘us.’

The construction of this social and political entity, which is usually referred to as

‘the people,’ corresponds with the intentionally produced effect of the Other’s

exclusion and separation and of the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ of in-

group and out-group. Fourth, populisms operate on claims of homogeneity: Social,

economic, cultural, and political differences are erased by the collective singular of

‘the people’ and the ‘common man,’ of ‘us,’ ‘them’ and so forth. Diversity,

according to this logic, undermines the genuine expression of the ‘true’ will of the

polity. Fifth, populisms establish a mobilizing structure of political

entrepreneurship, usually a charismatic figure and his supporters – the movement –,

or, to put it bluntly, of leader and followership. The leader is spokesman of the will

of the people, which is imagined as homogeneous and exclusive. He or she is the

medium through which the movement understands itself and finds its identity.

These feature descriptions of the m.o. of the phenomenon of populism are

heuristically valuable, but they do not tell us anything about the relationship

between populism and democracy yet. They could have neutral effects, they could

be used within the framework of democratic structures and politics, but they could

also, not least because of the basic convictions and dynamics operative within

them, push beyond democracy and lead to a transformation or destruction of

democratic structures and practices.

Populism as the Renewal of Democracy?

It was most notably Margaret Canovan who contributed with her work on the

historical manifestations of populism to a change in the perception that populism

per se poses a danger to democracy and constitutes a symptom of its degeneration.

For Canovan (see Canovan 1981, 1999), populism is a positive challenge to

democracy. She argues that democracy is based on a tension between stasis and

movement which from time to time is dissolved by populist movements. Whenever

democracies ossify, populisms re-galvanize them. Institutional mechanisms of

stabilization face off with invigorating elements, i.e. popular movements. From this

perspective, an alternative interpretation comes to the fore which breaks populism

free from its veneer of reactionary conservatism, nativism, and racism. Populism

gains the character of a radical political undertaking, a grassroots movement that

reinvigorates a vertically segmented democracy. Populism becomes a vital and

vitalizing element of democracy and can be categorically understood with Michael

Oakeshott as a “redemptive politics of faith” (Canovan 1999: 8; Oakeshott 21-38).

Populism ‘cleanses’ a democracy that has become rigid in its structures. Populism

in this sense should be understood as democracy in movement.

18 Hans Vorländer

Canovan’s change of perspective opens up an important analytical perspective

that helps explaining and interpreting the genesis and function of populisms within

the framework of modern democracies. Modern ‘Western’ democracies have

developed a complex network of institutions and procedures, of representative

decision-making processes and direct civic participation, which was ‘invented’

within a historical constellation in the second half of the eighteenth century and

which aimed at the reconciliation (and also restriction) of the sovereignty of the

people with the protection of basic and human rights. Liberal or constitutional

democracy ties (popular) sovereignty to the validity and guarantee of individual

rights and through balancing mechanisms provides a means to limit power. At the

same time, the political decision-making process takes place within the institutions

and procedures of democracy through representation. The problem is that this

model – which seemed to be promising self-determination, freedom, and stability

in times of increasing societal differentiation and in this way claimed to be superior

to the ‘pure,’ direct rule of the people – is itself delicate, too. It seems as if exactly

those populisms seep through the cracks between democracy as an institutional

decision-making system and democracy as a political way of life that create their

momentum from the real or perceived opposition between the establishment and

the people, between ‘those up there’ and ‘us down here.’ (see Vorländer 2011b,

2016).

Canovan thus has undoubtedly cast a fresh glance at the phenomenon of

populism. At the same time, her theoretical approach is every bit as ambivalent as

populisms themselves. Her declaring populism to be a force of democratic renewal

shows her to be inspired by its progressive variants. While this is not historically

wrong in view of the People’s Party in the US at the turn of the nineteenth to the

twentieth century and Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘Bull Moose’ Party – and one could

also add more recent forms of inclusive populism in Latin America – deducing

from these examples that populism in general constitutes an element of democratic

renewal can only be claimed by ignoring all other variants of populism. The

history, not least the very recent history, of populist movements does show after all

that populists – to put it as mildly as possible – are not exactly characterized by

their high respect for the institutions and structures of democracy. Canovan all too

speedily levels the difference between democracy and populism with her reading –

which is certainly inspired by Hannah Arendt – of progressive, populist democracy

in movement.

Thus Pegida, or ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West,’

which came into being a good four years ago, can for example be described as a

right-wing populist movement of indignation, which alongside criticisms of Islam,

xenophobia, and resistance against the immigration of refugees has publicly staged

all kinds of disappointments and frustrations as invectives against ‘politics,’

‘politicians,’ and ‘the media’ (see Vorländer et al. 2016, 2017, 2018). Slogans such


as ‘lying press’ and ‘traitor of the people’ on the one hand and ‘we are the people’

on the other reflect a fundamental political alienation between civic life-world and

politics as well as the media. On the one hand, the mediated public sphere and

political institutions are perceived as alien, as instruments of a faux democracy; the

representatives and decision-making processes of this system are regarded either as

‘fossilized,’ ‘conceited,’ or ‘corrupt.’ On the other, there are calls for a direct

democracy in which the people are in charge and politicians act merely as weak

and dependent ‘employees’ that are directly accountable to ‘the people’s will.’ This

vulgar understanding of democracy (Ernst Fraenkel) denies how complex, time-

consuming, and compromise-based political opinion- and decision-making

processes really are in a representative system and claims as a remedy the direct

assertion of the ‘unadulterated’ will of the people via plebiscite. It consequently

equates the job profile of elected officials with a simple ‘down/up’ model of ‘we

ask and order/you answer and deliver.’ “And who doesn’t deliver gets fired,” as a

Pegida supporter puts it; a people thus fires its representatives.

Populisms: An Expression of a Representational Deficit?

In view of contemporary populisms, the question now must be asked whether they

should be described as good, bad, or ugly. Is a positive interpretation of the current

movements acceptable? If populist attitudes and movements develop whenever

representative democracy has lost its balance between its two pillars – democracy

as a decision-making system and democracy as a way of life –, then indeed the

argument about representational deficiencies might take hold, i.e. the argument

about the poor or even complete lack of representation of parts of the population by

the institutions and channels of publicly visible decision-making processes, parties,

parliaments, and the media. Those who perceive themselves as having been left

behind, excluded, or insufficiently listened to then become the segment which

political entrepreneurs using the m.o. of populism capture and mobilize in order to

stand up against the ossification of democracy, against exclusion and

discrimination.

Trump and Farage, with considerable success, set themselves up as the

spokesmen of socioeconomically disadvantaged groups and of those who felt

culturally dominated. Marine Le Pen, as her father before her, has been able for a

long time to forge a national front of resistance from the social, cultural, and

religious tensions deriving not least from the immigration of people from the

francophone Maghreb and other former colonies. Pegida has (also) given voice to

the simmering resentment of that part of Saxony which has felt abandoned since

reunification in 1990, and the Alternative for Germany (as well as Pegida) have

similarly managed to transform widespread fears of losing control over the influx

20 Hans Vorländer

of migrants – fears that had not been part of the public discourse – into votes. All

of these movements, it seems, brought something to light that had been latent but

not visible. Populists entered the limelight and captured the discontented and

unrepresented, gave them a voice, lambasted the corruption of the elites, accused

politicians of treason, and equated the existing indignation with the ‘will of the

people.’

It is obviously difficult to call such populist movements good, especially as it

can be seen that they make common cause with extreme right and extremist groups

and that their main thrust – far beyond making visible problems of representation –

is to attack the foundations of liberal democracy. At the same time, it cannot be

denied that the current populist movements on the right demarcate lines of conflict

of the present age that have led to divisions in Western societies and to

disagreements within the European and transatlantic communities. These cleavages

can be interpreted culturally and/or socio-economically, as a struggle about cultural

identity in which ethnocentric and cosmopolitan attitudes and groups clash, or,

broadly speaking, as a socio-economic struggle between the winners and losers of

globalization.3 In most cases, the populists have been able to fuse cultural, social,

and economic factors as well as anti-European and nationalist-identitarian

sentiments, and thus to create maximum political momentum.

These populisms can be described as good at best in regard to their effects, in

particular if they are taken seriously as indicators of deficits within the

representational system and if the forces of democracy know how to respond. Then

populisms, as a reservoir of protest, could have an inclusive and transformative

function for a democracy that has weakened in its responsiveness. If non-voters

who have turned away from the established parties in resignation are re-integrated

into the political process, then this is a gain for democracy. Granted, if such a

populism of indignation is situative and temporary, then at the end of the day it

does not necessarily have to pose a threat to democracy but instead can act as a

rejuvenating therapy – provided that it has not antagonistically deepened the rifts in

society and lastingly damaged the institutional foundations of and trust in

democracy along the way.

The Phantasms of Populisms

However, this is true in many cases, as the mobilization strategies of populisms

deploy a set of ideologemes that contradict the foundations of modern, liberal

democracy. Orban’s ‘illiberal democracy’ provides a counter-image to an open,

3 For discussions of causes, lines of conflict etc. see e.g. Eribon; Hochschild; Merkel; Lilla;

Rodrik; Vorländer 2016.


pluralistic society; it is based on notions that can be described as the three

phantasms of homogeneity, authenticity, and immediacy, whose imaginaries aim

toward the destruction of the institutions, principles, and procedures of modern,

representative, and constitutional democracy. They blur the boundaries between

good, bad and ugly populisms.

Populisms distrust institutions which possess a certain institutional autonomy

and thus also immunity, such as the judiciary, constitutional courts, the media, or

central banks. These, in the eyes of populists and their supporters, distort the will

of the people. The same holds true for territorial divisions of power as they

commonly exist in federatively organized states. This distrust against the

institutions of liberal and constitutional democracy is furthermore accompanied by

the curtailment and intentional denial of the constitutionally guaranteed rights of

ethnic, national, cultural, and religious minorities. Diversity appears as bad because

it undermines the notion of an inviolable and uniform will of the people.

Negotiations, compromises, and deliberations then appear as diversionary

maneuvers or cover-ups, and interfere with the immediacy of the relation between

leader and people. Leaders of this kind today communicate with their followers

directly – preferably by tweet –, and also govern directly – preferably by decree –

both being preferred leadership tools of the US president.

The principle of immediacy thus replaces the civic, intermediary and mediated

decision-making processes typical of representative democracy. In a representative

democracy, political compromises are negotiated, and the principle of checks and

balances prevents the arbitrary exercise of power. Populists on the other hand

attempt to circumvent this so that the will of the people may become effective

immediately and directly – embodied and executed by the leader.

Furthermore, the proclaimed will of the people is the only one granted

legitimacy because it is deemed authentic in a double sense: as the expression of a

socially united entity and as the expression of a specific political will. Usually, this

social unity is deemed to have historical roots and to be locally or regionally

bounded, a ‘homeland’ of an allegedly intact past that must be preserved or

restored. The political will is also held to be authentic because it originates from

the collective unity of the people and is embodied directly through the medium of

the leader.

Populism at its core is based on the illusion of an intrinsic unity. The phantasm

of an organic unity of the body politic (see Lefort) has the advantage of allowing

one to assert the identity of a clearly and definitely defined political collective

which can be positioned against the strenuous and lengthy democratic process. It

generates a logic that eliminates the idea of difference and the Other from the

vision of democracy. The illusions of unity, identity, and a political collective,

22 Hans Vorländer

which particularly in the German context is semantically coded as

‘Volksgemeinschaft,’ then also become the nexus of populism and totalitarianism.4

Modern democracies, however, must insist on the fact that a plurality of values and

interests can only be balanced pro tempore through necessarily conflictual

decision-making processes. Democracy is based on the idea of an open society that

is integrated on the political level case-by-case, whereas populism is based on the

notion of a closed, homogeneous, historically or ethnically constituted collective

unit that finds its direct expression in the allegedly uniform will of the people.

From the standpoint of modern, representative democracy, populisms thus are

not to be trusted. Whether they were good, bad, or ugly, whether they had positive

effects of renewal and revitalization or rather shook the legitimacy of democracy or

even initiated an authoritarian-totalitarian transformation can usually be

determined only in hindsight. At which stage we are at the moment is difficult to

say. Findings will diverge from each other. In the US, the robustness of the

institution of democracy is being put to the litmus test – with an uncertain

outcome. In Central Europe – in Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic –

tendencies toward a semi-authoritarian transformation of democratic structures can

be discerned. In Western Europe, particularly in France, the populist flood seems

to have been contained, at least for the time being. Yet the current metamorphoses

of Western democracies still suggest that populism might become a “long shadow”

(Arditi 20) because contemporary democracies themselves manifest developments

that can be interpreted as a creeping populist transformation (see Vorländer 2011a,

2013; Mair; Decker 2003; Urbinati).

Populist Transformations of Democracy?

There are especially three developments that have to be mentioned here in

conclusion: the new social media have caused a fundamental transformation of the

public realm. While the shaping of public opinion had previously been strongly

influenced by audio-visual and print media, now forms of internet communication

have come to the fore. These operate faster and are able to organize political

articulations and protest on demand as well as to generate eruptive shifts in the

political mood. At the same time, hermetically closed networks are established

which as shared echo chambers create communities of the like-minded that

preempt dissent. Wherever rage, anger, and aggression, scandal-mongering and

conspiracy theories shape opinion, the digital era seems to spawn a new political

type – the democracy of indignation. The ‘connected multitude’ (Bernhard

4 Finchelstein convincingly elaborates on the commonalities but also the significant differences

between fascism and populism (see Finchelstein).


Pörksen) has power, but no institutional connection to the political decision-

making system. Yet it puts pressure on representative processes to react more

quickly and prove their legitimacy. The new populist movements on the left as well

as the right usually have their origins online and only at a later stage occupied the

streets and plazas. Social media in this context function as mobilizers of populisms.

This development is mirrored on the other side by a similarly profound

transformation of the institutions of constitutional democracy, which today are

much more responsive to the news cycle and attempt to react to current

developments on the fly and in real time. This leads to a preference for fast and

solitary decisions as well as to a presidential and at times almost autocratic

leadership style that runs counter to the time-consuming logic of counseling and

negotiation in representative decision-making processes as well as the necessary

incorporation of democratic committees and institutions, and thus creates a

backlash among those who are no longer listened to and represented. A democracy

of the elites and populist revolts are two sides of the same coin.

Ultimately it is the signs of disintegration of the political basis or of the social

infrastructure of democracy which as disruptions of the mediation between citizens

and political decision-makers structurally facilitate populisms. Parties, unions,

regulars’ tables, and associations more and more lose their politically binding,

organizing but also integrating character. In this way civil society loses important

social and intermediary institutions that mediate between politics and life-world.

The transformation of the party system, the loosening or dissolution of close social

bonds at the same time leads to an almost absolute personalization of the political

process. This is the hour of populist leader figures who know how to win over

voters by directly addressing them through perfectly staged (social) media

appearances.

The effects of these structural changes have made themselves felt for quite

some time: The collapse of the established party system in Italy, which had existed

since the post-war era – a strong Christian-democratic pillar on the one side and an

equally strong socialist-communist formation on the other –, made possible the rise

of Berlusconi and his party Forza Italia in the 1990s as well as more recently the

Movimento Cinque Stelle under the leadership of Beppe Grillo. The populist right-

wing Freedom Party of Austria has benefitted from the ossification of the Austrian

party system, which found its expression in the consolidation of a grand coalition

between the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the Social

Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ). The FPÖ could recently be prevented from

garnering a majority on the national level only when ÖVP-frontrunner Sebastian

Kurz, using populist strategies himself, ostentatiously distanced himself from his

party’s party line and effectively and successfully branded himself as a young and

dynamic candidate of renewal and change. After the recent political scandal

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